The tyranny of the minority

Recently, in response to a rather triumphalist tweet predicting the demise of Donald Trump,[1] I offered a summation of the political situation as I perceive it:

When law and order and justice eventually catch up to Trump, and it will happen, the story won’t be about Trump being guilty. The story will be why did the GOP let him get away with it for years? Why did they obstruct justice for a crook, conman and traitor?

We already have an answer to these questions. Political polarization is fundamentally driven by competing ideas about what the U.S. should look like. The @GOP and a plurality of @TheDemocrats are desperate to preserve patriarchy, differing only on which individuals should be 1/3 https://t.co/HzUBXr4JMe

in power. The Left wants something like patriarchy but with cis white male heterosexuals displaced from power, an inversion rather than a replacement of some existing power relationships. Some on the Left are quite well off themselves and therefore would preserve market 2/3

power relationships. Others on the Left seek, in addition, to at least ameliorate capitalist social injustice and environmental destruction. None of these groups command an absolute majority, but the @GOP enables @realDonaldTrump to preserve all these existing relationships. 3/3

Yes, it looks bad for Trump. Professional speculators suggest that Robert Mueller has cornered Trump in a couple ways: First, Paul Manafort allegedly lied, and Mueller is prepared to say so in court, but also, Manafort was apparently cooperating with Trump’s legal team while he was allegedly lying. If Trump’s answers to Mueller’s inquiry match up with Manafort’s lies, it will seem that Trump has lied. Second, Mueller seems to have evidence that Trump continued to seek permission from Vladimir Putin to build a hotel in Moscow, even while he was running for president, even after he claimed the deal was dead. Third, there’s the question of Roger Stone and alleged links to Wikileaks, which published embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails, and to Moscow.[3] So far, all we’re really seeing is the smoke. But having watched Mueller as long as we have, it’s a pretty good bet he’s got a fire.

The question, really, in a bipartisan system, is whether Democrats will be able to replace Trump in 2020. Here, the disarray among Democrats comes into play. The shenanigans by which Hillary Clinton gained control of the Democratic National Committee and thereby excluded Bernie Sanders, arguably the better candidate, from the 2016 presidential nomination remain unresolved.[4] Progressives should know that, by fair means or foul, mainstream (meaning neoconservative and neoliberal) Democrats will do everything possible to preserve their hold on the party. Even when the result is a President Trump and, perhaps yet still to come, a President Mike Pence.

The irony here is that so-called “third way” Democrats gained control of the party following landslide defeats of George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. The argument then, as it is today, is that progressives cannot win “moderate” votes. Implicit in this calculation is that progressives will have no alternative but to vote for the neoconservative and neoliberal Democrats and will do so to avoid the allegedly more evil Republican. Unfortunately, as we saw in 2016, when folks consistently vote for “the lesser of two evils,” it should be no surprise that we end up having to choose from the lesser of two evils, as Democrats have shifted ever rightwards trying to capture more of the so-called “moderate” vote.

There are a couple of problems here. First, and ultimately most seriously, vague appeals to a “middle way” do not translate to a coherent program. Incoherence results in muddled policy which, often contradicting itself, doesn’t attract much enthusiasm at the polls.

Second, and what we see most clearly from the 2018 midterm elections is that regardless of which faction you advocate, whether it be the authoritarian populists who now dominate the Republican Party, the neoconservative and neoliberal mainstream Democrats, inverted patriarchs, or democratic socialists, you do not command a majority of the U.S. electorate. Furthermore, your policies will be entirely unacceptable to at least two other factions of the electorate.

Persuasion does not work in this scenario. We are talking about deeply held perceptions, whether they be an authoritarian populist scapegoating of the “other,” a notion of politics as “the art of the possible” involving compromise with factions that will accept concessions without offering any of their own, a scapegoating of cis (non-transgender) heterosexual white males, or a revulsion towards economic inequality. Which means that no matter who wins, they can only impose their agenda through authoritarian means. “We won the election,” they can say; “you should try winning an election.” Which lasts until they lose, at which point their victorious opponents can say the same.

Author: benfell

David Benfell holds a Ph.D. in Human Science from Saybrook University. He earned a M.A. in Speech Communication from CSU East Bay in 2009 and has studied at California Institute of Integral Studies. He is an anarchist, a vegetarian ecofeminist, a naturist, and a Taoist.
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